Living as I have for decades right off the information super highway I was already aware of the seedy underworld of pick up artists. Or, if your the kind of geek who likes a mnemonic: PUAs.
Some commodities suffer from an imbalance, high demand and low quality of supply. The skill of how to get [...]
Saturday, February 13, 2010
I’ve not written about group forming for a while, but this paper about the power of synchronized behaviors in improving group cohesion is sweet. One of the authors is Chip Health, the author of that nice little book about how to teach so the knowledge is sticky. They show that marching, moving or singing in synch [...]
Sunday, December 27, 2009
I was skimming this long long post about the demographics and institutional affiliations of the community of climate skeptics, and deep in the body is this fascinating bit.
UPDATE (December 19, 2009): Peter Staats, in the comments, suggested that belief in anthropogenic global warming is entrenched among scientists and will disappear as the older generation dies [...]
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
I’m slowly rereading Olson’s “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups”. I find it pretty frustrating, but that’s another story.
In the section I was reading last night he gets to musing that there are two flavors of clubs: inclusive v.s. exclusive. Both create club goods. The default tendency of an [...]
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
When dealing with communities it’s nice to have some frame works. For example I like both the one from Collaborative Circles and this one. And I often highlight how the common cause that binds a community can be outward facing (defensive) or inward facing (building something). Here is another one: a dozen metrics for [...]
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
I got a spam-ish email today from a web site I signed into once years ago, A standard product management kind of thing, an attempt to entice me to come back. I get such things all the time from my assorted dormant credit cards. Thinking about it I’m surprised I don’t get more email like [...]
We build monitoring frameworks like the one I outlined in “Listening to the System” for at least four reasons. Their maybe legal requirements that we keep records for later auditing and dispute resolution. We may want to monitor the system so we can remain in control. We may want to collect data in service of [...]
Reading recently that as Microsoft was selecting the sites for their new cloud computer’s data centers they had 31 variables as input. I assume they plotted those on heat maps like this one showing the price of electricity across the United States.
Back in high school I Jane Jacob’s books on the economics of urban regions [...]
Thinking here about group forming and group forming networks; here’s one of those typical B-school 2D drawings:
Presuming we have solved both the problem of aggregating the group and extracting the value then points on that surface more valuable per size-of-group * value-of-member. This is the calculation that any site with an audience makes, or any [...]
This talk by Clay Shirky is a basicly the first bit of his book performed live.
He cut from the book the suggestion that the phase transition we are going thru is going to lead to chaos.
I don’t recall hearing before the delightful idea that Institution rely of carrots and sticks, but that if you want [...]
Fresh Links…